The Easiest (But Least Useful) Thing to Do About Syria is to Complain About Obama

These days, it's difficult to escape hearing lectures directed at the Obama Administration about what it should do in Syria. Many of the critiques, even by well-meaning and reasonably well-informed individuals, amount to little more than wishful thinking. And of course, there are the fire-breathing partisans who simply want to attack the Obama Administration. On Real Time last week, Niall Ferguson issued a frothy attack on the Obama Administration's record on conflicts in the Middle East while fastidiously ignoring the repeated question of what the Obama Administration should have done. I heard one critic claiming that a year or so ago it would have been possible to support a democratic revolution in Syria, but now the groups fighting Assad are all Islamist - which raises two obvious responses, the first being that if a democratic movement is that easy to squelch it didn't have much of a chance to begin with, and if we're talking about the same groups simply modifying their stated agenda in order to get support from Qatar and Saudi Arabia it's questionable whether they actually supported what we think of as democracy in the first place.

My eye was drawn for some reason to the latest anti-Obama harangue from Richard Cohen, a man who personifies the low-hanging fruit. It's almost embarrassing to pick apart his nonsense, like debating foreign policy with a kindergarten class, but... how to resist. Cohen sneers,

The president is the master of the muddle. He concocted a doozy in Afghanistan when he announced a surge and a date of withdrawal — a marriage and a divorce at the same time.

The think that Cohen should try to remember is that there's a difference between a policy that is "muddled" and one that he is not capable of understanding. Cohen is among those who don't understand that a "surge" is supposed to be a short-term escalation followed by withdrawal, not a long-term escalation with no end date. If you have no plan to end your "surge" then it's simply an escalation. Beyond that, why shouldn't the Obama Administration project an end-date for the longest war in American history, particularly when it seems clear that Afghan factions won't negotiate in good faith while the occupation continues. It may well be that things fall apart after we depart, but unless there's a reason to believe that prolonging the occupation will have a beneficial effect all we're doing is delaying the inevitable - at considerable cost. I understand that Cohen is not a man who cares about the cost of military action that he supports, whether in dollars or human cost, and that he may not even think about the cost, but those responsible for safeguarding the nation and ensuring that we have an effective military don't share his luxury of treating global conflict like an epic session of World of Warcraft, in which losses are measured in bits and pixels.

There's also something else Cohen doesn't seem to grasp about foreign occupation: people don't like it. Even if you can make the convincing case that your military intervention was a good thing, and liberated the people - and even if the people agree with that initial assessment - they want you gone. If it needs to be said, prolonged occupation is not good for relationships with the locals.

Cohen lectures,

For opponents of U.S. intervention in Syria, the instructive precedent is the Iraq fiasco. But that has so little in common with the Syrian situation they may as well cite the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua of early last century and the ultimate victory of the guerrilla leader Augusto Sandino. The more apt comparison is the 78-day NATO bombing campaign in 1999 that ended the bloodshed in Bosnia — and cost not a single American life. (Another apt comparison is Libya where, once again, no American boots were put on the ground and U.S. combat deaths were zero.)

And do you know why, to Cohen, the latter examples are instructive when the former are not? Because (a) he doesn't know spit about the conflicts he's describing (for starters, he's confusing the Kosovo and Bosnia interventions, and seems unaware of the military activity that occurred on the ground) and (b) he's cherry-picking examples that suggest that the U.S. can enter a civil war and achieve its objectives at a minimal cost - like we're playing a live action video game. Cohen doesn't explain why he believes that Bosnia is a better example, nor why the outcome in that region (century-old ethnic rivalries ignited, and a small nation shattered into several tiny nations) would be desirable in Syria. Or perhaps he imagines that a bombing campaign would somehow cause Syria's ethnic and tribal factions to unify? Cohen won't even hear about ethnic or tribal issues, sneering, "The weary recitation of all these ethnicities suggests a colonial-era mentality: those bloody people and their bloody behavior." As if dropping the word "colonial" somehow erases ethnic and tribal tensions from reality - and never mind that he, himself, made one of those "weary recitations" only a few days ago, "I have always recognized the difficulties of any intervention in Syria and the hideous ethnic complexities of the place".

Cohen huffs,

The operative philosophy is that you do what you can when you can. The United States has the muscle. There are few grander causes than the saving of human life.

Apparently our bombs don't kill people. Cohen has lectured his readers that it's "cold-hearted" not to... I guess it's "do something" in Syria, because there's a humanitarian need. And that would be great, if we knew up front that the cure wouldn't be worse than the disease. We helped the Afghan people liberate themselves from Mohammad Najibullah. They ended up with the Taliban. Cohen seems to think that all bloodshed will end the moment the civil war ends. Not to get all "colonial" about it, but there's good cause to believe that absent a significant outside military presence the civil war will be followed at best by ethnic cleansing and at worst by ugly reprisals of the sort he might recall from Lebanon... if he knew any history. Don't just take my word for it,

Mamoun al-Homsy, a former Syrian MP and one of the country’s opposition leaders, has reportedly recently distributed a recorded message to the Alawite community in Syria, in which he warns its members against supporting Assad.

In the message, al-Homsy called on the Alawites to immediately renounce Assad, warning them that if they do not do so, “Syria will become the graveyard of the Alawites.”

He also stressed that Syria’s Sunni Muslims “will not remain silent” over Assad’s crimes, adding that they intend to abide by the rule of “an eye for an eye” and will “teach you (Alawites) a lesson that you will not forget.”

Moving back to Cohen's opening paragraph,

I have written so many columns about the Syrian civil war they are like rings on a tree stump — a way of gauging Barack Obama’s steadfast inaction and what the cost has been. In one of my first columns about that war, I called on the administration to arm the rebels and impose a no-fly zone, grounding Bashar al-Assad’s attack helicopters and his airplanes. At that point — March 27, 2012 — the war had taken the lives of 10,000 Syrians.

For Cohen to relate the discussion back to his first demonstration of ignorance reveals little more than how wise the Obama Administration is to ignore him, even if it causes him to write an occasional angry missive about how they're not showing him the respect he deserves. Does Cohen understand that Syria built its air defenses using Russian technology to defend against an Israeli military? It's not that the U.S. cannot defeat Syrian air defenses - it's that doing so will involve considerable risk, and will necessarily involve bombing targets throughout the country, including in densely populated areas. Even Cohen must know better than to lecture, "Somebody like Assad would never endanger civilians by building air defenses that cannot be taken out without bombing civilian neighborhoods." But then, he seems to believe that bombs don't kill people, so... who knows what he thinks.

More than that, Cohen is ignorant of the fact that Syria is not dependent on aircraft and, just as in Libya, there's no reason to believe that a cumbersome, expensive no-fly zone would create a significant shift in favor of anti-Assad forces. Were Cohen aware of the history of U.S. actions in Libya, he would be aware that the Obama Administration rejected the simple imposition of a no-fly zone because they did not believe that it would result in Qadaffi's defeat. Cohen has incredible faith in no-fly zones because... he imagines them to have a much more impressive history of affecting the outcome of regional conflicts than history in fact indicates. The no-fly zone in Iraq was in effect for a decade and, while preserving the status quo, did not remove Hussein from power nor weaken his ability to maintain control without a full-scale U.S. invasion.

And this magic wish, "Let's arm the rebels" - if it were easy to find rebels worthy of being armed, it would be a no-brainer. As it's not, the only no-brainer in the discussion is again Richard Cohen. There's a reason Israel is fastidiously refusing to publicly take sides in the conflict, and it's not because they want Assad to win or because they don't care about the outcome. In the early column he references, Cohen purports that a rebel victory "would be a boon to Israel". If he's capable, perhaps Cohen should ponder for a while why Israel doesn't seem to share his opinion. Perhaps as part of that consideration, he can ponder the Pentagon estimate that it would take 75,000 ground troops to ensure that Syria's chemical weapons arsenal - which is highly portable and highly distributed - does not fall into the wrong hands.

Here's a thought that should be obvious, even to Cohen: If there were good, easy choices to be made to end this conflict, we wouldn't be wrestling with how to avoid turning an already big mess into a bigger mess. If the sort of magic solution that ends the conflict, replaces Assad's regime with a more forward-thinking, inclusive government, and prevents humanitarian catastrophe were easy, the world would have already implemented that solution. Instead, the only part of the conflict that's easy is to sit at the sidelines with little knowledge of the region, its history or the facts on the ground and complain, "The Administration's not doing things the way I would."

A Lethal President?

Same as it ever was.

It's not that I don't appreciate the concerns raised by those who question the targeting of a secret list of enemies of the state, whether by drone or by commando raid. Those concerns are for the most part well-founded, and the issues will only become more pressing.

Drone technology will continue to advance. It's easy to imagine a future in which drones the size of birds or insects can be used to strike somebody who has been declared an enemy of the United States, with minimal chance of damage to anything or anyone beyond the target. But such an advancement would not resolve the question of who should be placed on a "kill list" or why, what due process should be available to a targeted individual, or how accurately the government determines who should be on the list. Similarly, the U.S. military is likely to increasingly rely upon special forces, and small, targeted raids, rather than full-scale land invasions.

As these trends continue, some questions wil become more pressing. Will improved drone technologies inspire a rapid escalation of the use of drones and the circumstances under which they're deemed appropriate? As drones continue to take the place of boots on the ground, will the temptation be to rely upon drones to kill people who could or should have been taken prisoner? Will the margins blur in relation to who is an appropriate target - terrorists and their sympathizers vs. the political leaders of rogue or enemy states? And as drone use is legitimized and expanded, what happens when other nations inevitably gain similar technology and start applying it to contexts that they deem equivalent to ours?

History implicates all of those questions, and then some, in relation to pretty much any protracted conventional or asymmetrical conflict, anywhere in the world. When under threat, developed nations with well-educated populations tend to tolerate, accept, even applaud the use of tactics that they once deplored - and perhaps continue to deplore when exercised by other nations. Indefinite detention without trial? Torture? Dismissing the Geneva Conventions as outdated relics? The Bush Administration's decisions on those issues were in many ways regrettable, but the U.S. was far from the first nation to rationalize that actions we used to describe as crimes and human rights violations were necessary to achieve the greater good.

Cato Institute Policy Scholar Jason Kuznicki's reaction to "kill lists" and drone strikes is about as strident as you'll find. He points out that the President's "kill list" can include U.S. citizens, even minors, "including within the United States. Including children sleeping peacefully in their homes."

If Obama wanted to, he could put all of Mitt Romney’s delightful, gingham-clad grandkids on the kill list, then send commandos to kill them (or drones, it hardly matters). He wouldn’t need to show any cause, and no one could stop him or tell him otherwise.

Do not say that he wouldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t. The problem is that someone else might. And that’s enough.

Kuznicki declares,

Yet the very act of claiming the power also calls into question anyone’s good judgment. How exactly does someone conclude that he, personally, deserves the unchecked power of life and death? I couldn’t. I would be ashamed to show my face in front of you or to call you my equals. I might be a god or a beast, but not a man in a society.

I'm not going to argue that it's a job I would want. It isn't. But although the mechanism has changed, what Kuznicki is describing has been part of the President's job from day one. Every armed conflict, domestic or abroad, involved strategic decisions that may prioritize destroying a block of buildings or even a town or urban area in order to harm the enemy's ability to produce weapons, mobilize, feed its troops, or may even be justified by the belief that a "high-value" individual is in the targeted area. You want to talk about the deaths of children sleeping in their beds? There's a reason that allied commanders were concerned that fire bombing raids in Germany and Japan might be deemed war crimes.

We are presented with a modern myth of surgical warfare, collateral damage is minimized, civilians aren't harmed, our soldiers are less likely to be killed. There's a disturbing sequence in the movie, Waltz With Bashir, in which a series of efforts to target militants result in the deaths of civilians, presented in the manner of a comedy montage. The film also highlights how a thin veneer of rationalization can help somebody who might otherwise be wracked with guilt decide that his role in an atrocity was marginal or excusable. I'm not trying to argue that an individual citizen or soldier will change the course of history by speaking up, but it's much easier to disregard our role if we think of ourselves as noble heroes, at least trying to do good and minimize harm, offloading responsibility for collateral damage or atrocity onto local forces or our enemies.

Kuznicki knows our nation's history, so he knows we have a long history of legal presidents and generals, deciding from a distant war room what military measures to take, estimating losses to their forces, our forces and civilians, drawing up lists of individuals who should be captured or killed, dispatching special forces and snipers to capture or kill specific individuals. He knows that the Constitution was drafted with that lethality in mind - the Constitution's suspicion of standing armies, preservation and reliance upon state militias, placing a civilian President in charge of the military, and attempting to create a system of checks and balances to rein in excess. Yet Kuznicki writes of the President,

We know that no one gets to review his decision. Ever. The ones who might do it have all abdicated the responsibility.

Kuznicki, in essence, declares that he is never again going to vote for a candidate who has a realistic chance of winning the presidency because Congress and the courts aren't doing their jobs. Frankly, I would view skeptically even the most sincere promise of a third party candidate to change the practice if elected, not only because presidents tend to accept any expanded powers achieved by their predecessors, but also because he'll have to directly face and address the consequences of a policy change.

I don't want to overstate the role of the courts, as Congress hasn't provided either the courts or prospective litigants with much of a framework for these issues, but their overall history is to defer to the executive on issues of national security and to quietly regret any mistakes only in future decades. The branch of government that has been least willing to do its job in this context is Congress. You'll find Republicans like Darrell Issa angrily demagoguing about issues of embassy security, but when there's hard work to be done - when they are asked to take ownership of their own failings - you'll find excuses ("Our refusal to fund increased embassy security has nothing to do with the fact that it wasn't increased") or silence. You can get objections out of Republicans like Issa over drone and cruise missile strikes - if they produce favorable media coverage; "The President did that to distract you from domestic politics, wag the dog, wag the dog!" But that type of reaction is not a substantive objection - its a politically calculated claim that relates only to timing.

We don’t need an elected beast-god with a kill list. We need to end the system that proposes, every four years, to place one of our human equals into that role. A role any decent human would refuse. And this election just isn’t going to do it.

This election won't do it, the next one won't either, nor the next.... To prevent Presidents from having this power, we would need a constitutional amendment. And as long as Congress pretends that this is not an issue, and the general public reaction is to accept the notion of surgical strikes with no collateral damage (the key rationalization, if you're innocent you won't be near the target, right?), and the media at large treats the issue with a collective yawn, nothing will change.

In Esquire, addressing the fine line that can exist between targeted killings and murder, Tom Junod argues that, unlike his predecessors, President Obama "had to answer an additional question before you took the job. Other presidents had to decide whether they could preside over the slaughter of massed armies, and the piteous suffering of whole populations." But again, that's more a question of degree, and of technology, than it is of fact. Sure, Ronald Reagan had to launch a significant air raid on Libya to try to kill Gadhafi. George H.W. Bush had to indvade Panama to capture Manuel Noriega. Clinton, though, sent cruise missiles to try to kill Osama bin Laden.

One could argue based upon that history that the new way is better - that as technology has advanced, in many contexts we can avoid the type of massive collateral damage that results from a full-scale invasion, even if we won't have to subsequently occupy the nation whose leader we've toppled. It's possible to point to the history of "boots on the ground" in nations like Somalia, and argue that the President can get at least as much cooperation from local warlords by making them aware of the possibility of a targeted drone strike, without putting large numbers of soldiers into the nation at great expense and considerable risk to their lives.

One could reply that history doesn't yet demonstrate that those possibilities are now reality, but the come-back would presumably be that a failed intervention by drone will cost far less in terms of money and lives than the cost of a failed intervention by land. If the choice is to "try drones and special forces" or "do nothing", what does an advocate of "humanitarian intervention" do? If the choice is between attempting to achieve a surgical victory, even if the surgery will be a lot less precise than the government or media are likely to admit, and a massive on-the-ground assault, can we really presuppose that the latter will be less lethal to civilians, more precise, or more likely to bring about and sustain the outcome we want?

A rather compelling objection to targeted killings, particularly in the context of asymmetrical warfare or a distributed target organization, is that the strategy can degenerate into trying to fight a hydra - cut off one head and two grow back. There was a period under Bush during which it seemed like a month wouldn't go by without a successful strike taking out the #2 or #3 man in al Qaeda. Either the strikes were a lot less accurate than the Bush Administration let on (and in some cases we know that to be the case - with the targeted individual turning up alive at a different location) or the U.S. was encountering the same level of "success" as nations have traditionally achieved by capturing and killing "terrorist" leaders - they're pretty easily replaced, and sometimes "martyring" the leader helps with recruiting efforts. Also, while collateral damage may seem modest and acceptable to somebody sitting in the U.S., you can rest assured that the populations hit by those attacks don't share our detachment when it's their loved ones who are being killed.

If Kuznicki wants change, he has a decent platform from which to advance his opinions in the public sphere. Far better than most. But if he wants to influence a political actor, rather than refusing to vote for the President and implicitly urging others to follow, he should be attempting to turn up the heat on Congress.

Thanks to Michael Gerson, It's All So Obvious....

All we have to do in Afghanistan is "win then negotiate". (Um... but wouldn't that be appeasement?)

Gerson's editorial, as you might expect, is useless. It tells us why we should "win" - because if we don't there is no question but that the girls and women of Afghanistan will suffer horribly in at least parts, and more realistically in most or all of the country. But he ignores both the present reality, that girls and women continue to suffer horribly in parts of Afghanistan despite a massive military presence, the cultural factors that have created and will perpetuate that reality, and a history in which the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and gave girls and women many rights that they enjoyed right up to the end of Soviet occupation, and the fact that desire for victory is not a strategy.

I'm not sure whether Gerson is simply sharing the Kool-Aid served up by his former boss - that the war is about the rights of women, with the implication that its success be measured by the progress of women in Afghan society - or if he's also drinking. Certainly, the more you learn about the plight of women under the Taliban, the more horrifying the conception of allowing that type of oppression to recur. But the sad reality is that Bush's strategy for Afghanistan appears to have in fact been to keep enough troops present to avoid overtly losing that war before the end of his presidency. His administration recognized that the best way to keep the public engaged and supportive of that war, and the one in Iraq, was to contend that a principal goal of the wars was to advance civil rights for women and for marginalized ethnic groups and, as Gerson continues to argue, that negotiation or withdrawal would lead to horrors for those groups. It's hard to argue with that. The problem is, as they say, it's easier said than done.

The position advanced by Gerson - we must "win" - tells us nothing either about how we might win or what a victory might look like. It did provide Bush with convenient cover for his strategy of perpetuating a war that he seemed to have lost interest in demonstrably winning - but there's a world of difference between advancing and solidifying the rights of women and minorities, and giving them lip service when your only real goal is to avoid revealing your war strategy as an abject failure.

Gerson also parrots the inevitable argument of proponents of indefinite occupation - that the groups that are resisting occupation are simply waiting us out, and even if they give lip service to our goals as part of a negotiation aimed at getting us out of their country they'll revert to their actual policies the moment we're gone. But that doesn't distinguish this occupation from any other. Unless you're going to follow the model of an occupying power that is going to dig in, force cultural change, and remain in occupation for the decades - perhaps generations - it takes for the occupied people to incorporate your culture, you can expect that the occupied people will return to many, most, and perhaps all of their own cultural traditions once allowed to do so. When we talk about the Russian Jews or Chinese Catholics, we talk about the indomitable human spirit. Just because you don't like the Taliban's religious or cultural beliefs doesn't mean that they're any less sincere or deeply held. For that matter, Gerson apparently believes that it's only the Taliban that oppresses women, while many non-Talibani warlords have historically done exactly the same thing and continued those practices even after the Taliban was deposed.

Similarly, we can look at our own nation's history. Gerson is probably aware of the U.S. civil war and its nominal end of slavery. He is probably aware that it took more than a century for overtly racist laws and policies to be ended in many southern states. He may be aware that racism lives on in this country and that there remains a population of people who argue that African Americans are socially or genetically inferior, sometimes both. Perhaps he's forgotten that women didn't have the right to vote in this country until 1920. Even in the western world, effecting cultural change can be painfully slow.

Perhaps Gerson's not aware of the fact that even long-term occupation doesn't guarantee that a group opposed to the occupation won't rise in power after the occupation ends, either to rebel against the government or to form a secessionist movement. Perhaps he missed how several European nations reverted to ethnic conflict, even dividing into separate nations, after the fall of the Soviet Empire. Perhaps he missed the ugly ethnic rivalries present in many nations of the post-colonial world, including Iraq. Closer to Afghanistan... no, make that in Afghanistan... perhaps he missed the collapse of the government left behind by the USSR when it ended its occupation. Perhaps he's never heard an Afghan speak with pride about how his nation has never been successfully conquered. Perhaps he is also unfamiliar with the concept of blowback. Perhaps he missed how Israel's efforts to defeat the PLO led to its ill-fated occupation of Southern Lebanon, and turned Hezbollah into its enemy, or how its efforts to marginalize and defeat the secular PLO in the occupied territories led to the rise of Hamas.

Whether or not he tried, even as he provided a link to the actual story, Gerson couldn't quite bring himself to be honest. He argues that, when asked about the possibility of settlement with the Taliban, CIA Director Leon Panetta responded that they're not truly interested in reconciliation. In fact, Panetta was speaking broadly of "insurgent groups". Gerson's notion that this means the U.S. should double down, committing even more troops and money to defeat insurgent groups who show no interest in sincere negotiation after being on the receiving end of the longest war in U.S. history might, perhaps, make a more thoughtful person wonder if a military victory can be achieved. Such a person might question whether massive military actions, injuries and deaths to civilians, the overwhelming presence of foreign occupying forces, and the effort by those forces to redefine local culture might not be an effective mechanism to force a monumental shift of Afghan culture. Or whether it's reasonable or feasible to wipe out an enemy that has sufficient support within the community that its fighters can fade into the civilian population when they want to hide from occupying forces. (Has Gerson read nothing about the Vietnam War?)

With due respect to Gerson's emphasis on human rights, that apparently commenced with the U.S. occupation, perhaps he should spend some time explaining the policy positions of the pre-9/11 Bush Administration. Does Gerson agree that women's rights should take a back seat to the war on drugs? That they don't merit mention when we're talking about eradication of opium poppies, but for some reason must be front and center in any discussions that are intended to end a bona fide, shooting war? It's easy to endorse the human rights conception of the war in Afghanistan, which is why the Bush Administration pushed that conception of the war, but if you look at the Bush Administration's actions it's difficult to view its professed interest in the plight of Afghan women as anything more than spin. Gerson started penning speeches for Bush in 1999 - he must know that history. For that matter, he must be aware of how hard Bush pushed (or should I say didn't push) Saudi Arabia to improve its treatment of women.

Some fair questions for Gerson:

• How, exactly, is he defining victory in Afghanistan?

• How long will it take to achieve that victory?

• What will be the cost in both dollars and lives?

• Are there any U.S. strategic interests that he deems more important than human rights for the Afghan people and, if so, what are they?

• What should the United States do if it finds a way to achieve all of its military and security objectives in Afghanistan, but with the trade-off being that it does nothing to alleviate the plight of women?

• What level of human rights would Gerson find sufficient - for example, does he envision a U.S. military occupation that lasts until Afghanistan treats women in the manner of the United States? In the manner of Saudi Arabia?

• What if the generals to whom Gerson insists we must defer find that, to defeat the Taliban, the U.S. must ally itself with warlords who don't share the Taliban's religious zeal but treat women in the same manner as does the Taliban?

As Gerson also contends that we're now "winning" in Iraq, it's also fair to ask - if we apply the measure of his former boss, how are we actually doing? Or is he changing the measure of what victory is supposed to look like as a matter of convenience to his present argument? If I may be concrete, if we were to assume a full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, should we expect the post-victory Iraqi government to support or oppose Iran's nuclear program, and on what evidence?

Human Rights and Withdrawal from Afghanistan

A contrarian view of the human rights impact of continuing the war in Afghanistan, but given the author it's not one to easily dismiss: a woman who "was elected to Afghanistan"s parliament in 2005 and kicked out in 2007 by the warlords".

Eight years ago, women's rights were used as one of the excuses to start this war. But today, Afghanistan is still facing a women's rights catastrophe. Life for most Afghan women resembles a type of hell that is never reflected in the Western mainstream media.

In 2001, the U.S. helped return to power the worst misogynist criminals, such as the Northern Alliance warlords and druglords. These men ought to be considered a photocopy of the Taliban. The only difference is that the Northern Alliance warlords wear suits and ties and cover their faces with the mask of democracy while they occupy government positions. But they are responsible for much of the disaster today in Afghanistan, thanks to the U.S. support they enjoy.

The U.S. and its allies are getting ready to offer power to the medieval Taliban by creating an imaginary category called the "moderate Taliban" and inviting them to join the government. A man who was near the top of the list of most-wanted terrorists eight years ago, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has been invited to join the government.

I wish the ideas were better developed, rather than fitting within the @800 word limit of an op/ed column, but if I were to infer why she favors withdrawal it's likely because U.S. policy seems likely to cement in place a corrupt, misogynistic government.

Should We Withdraw from Afghanistan

The Guardian offers essays on continuation of the war in Afghanistan, arguing both sides of the question (from a British perspective). The argument to stay first observes the effect of seven years of the Bush Administration's neglect and incompetence:

By 2008, the situation had deteriorated so far that, with the Taliban established in outlying districts of the city, friends in Kabul who had returned in 2002 were wondering where to go if forced to flee again.

Things have since improved:

Now, finally, with Barack Obama in the White House and an American military which, for all its faults, has shown an impressive ability to learn (or relearn), we have in place the strategy that we should have had years ago. It depends on restricting the air strikes and the indiscriminate firepower, deploying troops to protect the population rather than treating them as a neutral terrain on which to hunt insurgents, training local troops, creating secure physical space for commerce, political space for some kind of process potentially leading to the eventual creation of a broadly legitimate government structure linked to broader regional initiatives.

That sounds good, right?

But will this strategy work?

Probably not.

To put it mildly, ouch. (Read the editorial for a list of everything that has gone wrong, that we're unlikely to be able to right.)

The human rights argument is weak, too. It is almost certain that any stable Afghanistan is going to be much more conservative, much more anti-western and much more authoritarian than we would like. Better than a Taliban-run state perhaps but more like Saudi Arabia than Sweden. A continued commitment will not guarantee girls the right to go to school across the entire country.

So why fight then? Why send more young men to their deaths? Why spend more money that could be used for hospitals, schools or saving banks?

For the simple reason that we owe it to the Afghans to try to make the new strategy work. Every death is a tragedy, but the price in lives and money is not an exorbitant one given the size, wealth and military history of the UK. After years of errors, we finally have a chance to do something right. In two or three years, we will know if there is a chance that the strategy can succeed. If it does, we can be proud. If it doesn't, at least we are unlikely to have made things worse. More important, we can at least honestly say to the Afghan people that we did our best.

Within the context of a strategy that does not depend upon Hamad Karzai (or his successor) being honest, competent or helpful, with the moderate goal of creating a society that's "merely" extremely oppressive to women as opposed to extraordinarily oppressive... conceding the narrow scope of what we're likely to achieve is a bitter pill. I don't think that argument is likely to persuade anybody who doesn't have a sense of how atrocious life became for women under the Taliban, but I can understand why the author, familiar with that history, wants to give it one more honest effort before we give up.

Save Your Anger For Fictitious People

George Will presents something of an incoherent mumble on anger today, noting that people he assumes are liberal get angry over a shortage of parking at Whole Foods, and that other people get angry about speed bumps. This somehow relates to the perception that healthcare is a right, not a privilege, although Will doesn't do much to explain the connection.

If our vocabulary is composed exclusively of references to rights, a.k.a. entitlements, we are condemned to endless jostling among elbow-throwing individuals irritably determined to protect, or enlarge, the boundaries of their rights. Among such people, all political discourse tends to be distilled to what Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School calls "rights talk."

Witness the inability of people nowadays to recommend this or that health-care policy as merely wise or just. Each proposal must be invested with the dignity of a right. And since not all proposals are compatible, you have not merely differences of opinion but apocalyptic clashes of rights.

Consider, for example, George Will himself. Having decided that corporations, fictitious persons, are entitled to the full panoply of rights granted to real people by the Bill of Rights, he's been sputtering with anger for years over efforts to regulate corporate speech. That, of course, he sees as a perfectly sensible exercise of pique - of his (self-)righteous, conservative anger - whereas it's pure silliness to advocate that real, living, breathing human beings have rights.

Meanwhile, I have to wonder how he came to witness the parking lot anger at Whole Foods. Perhaps after stealing somebody's parking space, while on his way to buy an heirloom tomato on the maid's day off?

Update: Civil rights at work, George Will-style.

The Importance of Coming Clean

Two news stories which, but for the choices of the Bush Administration, wouldn't be in the news....

• Dick Cheney shoots his friend. Why is it still a story? Because Mr. Cheney didn't immediately issue a statement about what happened, ideally with some of the remorse he expressed several days later during his interview on Fox News.

• New Abu Ghraib Pictures. Whether you think they're "more of the same" or even more shocking than the first batch, the Bush Administration's effort to squelch these pictures has led to them coming out in dribs and drabs (with a possible torrent soon to come from Salon).

In the former case, it's hard to tell what Mr. Cheney was thinking - this was obviously going to be a headline story which, if managed improperly, could drag on for days or weeks. Yet it is almost as if the Vice President's office set out to handle the media aspects improperly.

In the latter case, while it would have been a bitter pill to swallow, had all of the pictures been released when the initial set of photographs came to public attention, this would be an old story. Sure, it might have been more difficult for the Administration to spin its "just a few bad apples" line, or to convince as many people that the mistreatment of prisoners was minor. But we wouldn't have a new headline story, and new pictures being distributed in the Middle East when tensions are already very high. (And right on the heels of a similar British scandal.)

I know that the government, and the Bush Administration in particular, loves its secrets. But for once, perhaps they should weigh the cost of secrecy against the benefit of honesty.

Better than Appeasement?

Today's Washington Post brings us an editorial suggesting that, believe it or not, the present strategy of appeasement is not the best tactic for resolving the world's concerns about North Korea, and dares to suggest that human rights should be placed back on the agenda.

If There's Something Worse, Anything's Better?

In a continuation of yesterday's comments, another thing occurred to me while I was reading Kristof's column on Cambodia and sweatshops. Southeast Asia is notorious for its sex industry. As Thailand has tried to legitimize itself and to seem "safer" for tourists, it has worked to diminish some of the less savory aspects of its sex industry. These elements are setting up shop in Cambodia.

If we were to tweak Kristof's column a bit:

I'd like to invite George Bush and the other Republican puritans to come here to Cambodia and discuss "morality" with scavengers like Nhep Chanda, who spends her days rooting through filth in the city dump. One of the most unfortunate trends in the Republican party has been the way nearly all of the major voices, including the President, have been flirting with anti-prostitution positions by putting the emphasis on human rights standards in international agreements.

My guess is that they sincerely believe that such policies would help poor people abroad — and that's why they should all traipse through a Cambodian garbage dump to see how economically naïve shutting down Cambodia's brothels would be. Nhep Chanda, age 17, averages 75 cents a day for her efforts. For her, the idea of being exploited in a brothel — working only six days a week, inside instead of in the broiling sun, for more than $2 a day — is a dream.

All the complaints about third world brothels are true and then some: they use child prostitutes, foster drug addiction, and spread disease. But they have raised the standard of living in the Philippines and Thailand, and they offer a leg up for people in countries like Cambodia. In Asia, moreover, the brothels tend to hire mostly girls and young women with few other job opportunities. The result has been to begin to give girls and women some status and power, some hint of social equality, some alternative to picking garbage or working in sweatshops. The fundamental problem in the poor countries of Africa and Asia is not that brothels exploit too many workers; it's that they don't exploit enough.

I'm not intending this to be a fair criticism of Kristof - he specifically recites the sex industry as a source of employment that the sweatshops permit women to avoid. But once you get past issues of "morality", his arguments seem to apply equally in both contexts - and he seems quite willing to set aside issues of morality in the context of the conduct and operation of sweatshops.

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It's Breaking Out All Over?

In today's Washington Post, Fred Hiatt presents "The Nitty-Gritty of Democracy, which examines the treatment of an Egyptian human rights activist both by her own government and by ours:

Dr. Seif El Dawla, a psychiatrist who was in this country to receive an award from Human Rights Watch, founded the Egyptian Association Against Torture and helps run a clinic for female victims of violence, whether state-sponsored or domestic. She has battled religious intolerance as well as government repression, thus occupying the narrow space that administration officials now say must be expanded if democracy in the region is to take root.

But over the past few months, as President Mubarak's regime has refused to register her organization, she says she has sensed no support from the U.S. Embassy.

He also observes that, rather than democratizing, Morocco "seems to have made the decision to restrict liberty in the name of security".

Hiatt also writes,

In an interview last week, an administration official knowledgeable about Mideast policy acknowledged that some skepticism is to be expected. "We don't have a lot of credibility in some places," the official said. "People understandably say, for decades you haven't cared about democracy and you haven't cared about human rights. . . . Part of what we have to do, and what I hope we're beginning to do, is show people that we are serious, that we're here for the long term."

Which, perhaps, explains why we're ignoring Dr. El Dawla, and closing Iraqi media outlets in the name of security - to advance our notions of democracy and free speech.

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